Over the summer months, we'd like to share a few stories from startups around the world: what are they working on and how they are using the cloud to get things done. Today, we're profiling Filter Squad from Perth, Australia!

Filter Squad is a startup focused on building “apps that find what you like”, according to CTO Stuart Hall. They began with a #1 selling iPad/iPhone app called Discovr Music in January 2011 and expanded the discovery product suite to include Discovr App in June 2011, which has been a #1 category application in 17 countries. As the name implies, Discovr Music makes it easy for users to find music they like based on their preferences, while Discovr App recommends apps the user might like based on the ones you're already using. “We have been extremely happy with AWS and we also plan to use it for our future products. We are big fans of products such as Amazon RDS and the Elastic Load Balancer to give a complete app scaling solution with Amazon EC2”, says Stuart.

Take a look at the Discovr Music app review from Fox News:

AWS & Lean Startups

Because we are a small, lean team, we were looking for a hosting solution that was going to be easy for us to setup, be reliable, and be easy to scale up and down throughout our product iterations. We looked at a large number of providers, but AWS stood out immediately for a number of reasons:

Low maintenance

Easy to scale

Simple to setup

Provided good redundancy

We couldn't find anyone else who could match the AWS products and price. The number of other large, successful companies also using the service was very reassuring.

Building a Native iPhone/iPad App on AWS

Native mobile apps often need server-side components to create a rich user experience. For our Discovr Apps and Discover Music apps, we have used the following AWS products:

Amazon EC2 - because we had no idea of the market reaction to the application when we launched, flexibility in adding and removing virtual servers based on demand was key.

Amazon RDS - we needed a database that would also be easy to scale and be easy to maintain. Amazon RDS provided easy scaling, easy replication for slave instances, and a system where minor software updates are handled entirely by AWS.

Amazon S3 - S3 provides a great and cheap way to host static resources, one with which we had worked before and found ideal for our use case.

Amazon Elastic Load Balancer - the load balancer is provided straight out of the box: it doesn't require any installing and it needs very little configuration. The load balancer provides built in health checks and takes out instances that are not behaving. Elastic load balancing has been faultless since we launched.

Caching: the only thing missing was a caching solution, which AWS has since launched and we will be soon moving to. This was also a big consideration, the pace at which AWS are iterating and improving their service matches our philosophy to application development.

We are also big fans of New Relic for monitoring our AWS instance performance.

Scaling up Ruby on Rails with AWS

We use Ruby on Rails server side, Objective C, and Java for client side. More details of our stack, including our architecture and test data, can be seen detailed on our blog.

Words of Wisdom for Other Startups:

Understand that you can do it from anywhere, you don’t have to be based in Silicon Valley, or even a big city. With the help of the internet and web services such as the AWS cloud, anyone can deliver great products from anywhere in the world.

For example we’re based in Perth, Australia. It’s a five hour flight to Sydney and our hometown is most definitely not the tech capital of the world! To sum up:

Build a great product, then don't forget to market it!

Treat your customers like precious gold.

Make it easy for your customers to talk to you and listen to what they say.

8 Days Left to Enter Your Startup in the AWS Start-up Challenge!This year's AWS Start-up Challenge is a worldwide competition with prizes at all levels, including up to $100,000 in cash, AWS credits, and more for the grand prize winner. Learn more and enter today!

You can also follow @AWSStartups on Twitter for startup-related updates.

In honor of today's Facebook Developer Conference, I'd like to recognize the success of our existing Facebook app developers and invite even more developers to kick-start their next Facebook app project with Amazon Web Services.

Quick Numbers We crunched some numbers and found out that 70% of the 50 most popular Facebook apps leverage one or more AWS services. Many of their developers rely on AWS to provide them with compute, network, storage, database and messaging services on a pay-as-you-go basis. In addition to Zynga’s popular FarmVille and CafeWorld, or games from Playfish and Wooga, many of the most exciting and popular Facebook apps are also running on AWS.

Here are a few examples:

RootMusic's BandPage app (currently the #1 Music App on Facebook, and #8 overall app on Facebook) helps bands and musicians build fan pages that will attract and hold the interest of an audience. RootMusic enables artists to tap into the passion their fans feel for their art and keep them engaged with an interactive experience. More than 250,000 bands of all shapes and sizes, from Rihanna and Arctic Monkeys, to bands you haven't heard of yet but may soon discover, have already made RootMusic’s BandPage their central online space for connecting with their fans. Artists use it to share music, release special edition songs/albums here, share photos, and list events/shows. BandPage now supports 30 million monthly active users from all over the world. Behind all the capabilities that ignite BandPage’s music fan communities lies a well-thought out, highly-distributed and highly-scalable backend, powered by Amazon Web Services:

"In 20 seconds, we can double our server capacity. In a high-growth environment like ours, it's very important for us to trust that we have the best support to give to the music community around the world. Five years ago, we would have crashed and been down without knowing when we would be back. Now, because of Amazon’s continued innovation, we can provide the best technology and scale to serve music communities needs around the world,” Christopher Tholen, RootMusic CTO.

Funzio's Crime City is #7 in the top 10 Facebook apps, and it’s the highest rated Facebook game to reach 1 million daily users with an average user rating of 4.9 out of 5. Crime City currently has 5.5 million monthly active users, with 10 million monthly active users at its peak. The iPhone version was recently listed among the top 5 games in the Apple Appstore and #1 free game in 11 countries and counting. Crime City sports modern, 3D-like graphics that look great on both Facebook and iPhone, and has a collection of hundreds of virtual items that players can collect.

Powering this incredibly rich user experience across multiple platforms is their business acumen in promoting the app, as well as a strong backend that leverages many AWS products to serve their viral and highly active user base. Funzio uses Amazon EC2 to quickly scale up and down based on demand, Amazon RDS to store game and current state information. They use Amazon CloudFront to optimize the delivery to a global, widely-distributed audience and to meet Facebook's SSL certificate requirements.

"At Funzio, we use AWS exclusively to host the infrastructure for our games. When developing social games, you need to be ready for that traffic burst for a hit game in a moment's notice. AWS provides us with the flexibility to quickly and efficiently scale our applications at all layers, from increasing database capacity in RDS, to adding more application or caching servers within minutes in EC2. Amazon's cloud services allow us to focus our efforts on developing quality games and not on worrying about managing our technology operations.” - Ram Gudavalli, Funzio CTO.

50Cubes, the creator of Mall World, is a startup that has developed one of the most highly-regarded and longer-running successful female focused social game on Facebook. With over 5 million monthly active users, Mall World has a track record of being not only one of the first but also the top game of its kind for the past 1.5 years and continues to entice users world-wide.

50Cubes powers Mall World and other games they developed with a suite of AWS products. Out of these, they value the Amazon Auto-scaling and EBS features the most – these products helps them effortlessly scale up and down their exclusive use of Amazon EC2 instances with user demand. Their database clusters are a mix of MySQL and other key value storage databases, all hosted and managed by the team on Amazon EC2 using EBS for Cloud Storage.

"One thing that impresses me the most about AWS services is that they have rapidly iterated and improved their products and services over the past year and half, executing almost like a startup of our scale." - Fred Jin, 50cubes CTO.

“AWS is great for Facebook developers – you can start small, test and prove your ideas. As your app grows, you can easily scale up your resources to keep your users engaged and connected. AWS allows developers to build highly-available, highly-scalable, cost-efficient apps that provide the type of rich and responsive user experiences that our global audience has grown to expect.”

We have updated the AWS SDK for iOS and the AWS SDK for Android to make it easier for you to build applications that need to make calls to AWS using your AWS credentials.

Until now, your AWS credentials would have to be stored on the device. If your credentials are embedded in a mobile application there is no straightforward way to rotate them without updating every installed copy of the application. Alternatively, each installed copy of the application could require entry of an individual set of AWS credentials. This option would add some friction to the installation process.

The SDK now includes support for using temporary security credentials provided by the AWS Security Token Service. The SDK provides two sample applications that demonstrate how to connect to a token vending machine which serves as an interface to the AWS Security Token Service. See the Credential Management in Mobile Applications article for more details.

Applications that make use of the token vending machine can obtain AWS credentials on an as-needed basis. You can use the token vending machines that we supply, or you can implement your own.

Our token vending machines are distributed as WAR files that can be run with AWS Elastic Beanstalk, preferably using the credentials of an IAM (Identity and Access Management) user. We have provided two versions of each token vending machine, Anonymous and Identity.

Anonymous Token Vending MachineThe Anonymous token vending machine is designed to support registration at the device level. It supports two principal functions - registerdevice and gettoken. Here is the basic request and response flow:

Identity Token Vending MachineThe Identity token vending machine is designed to support registration and login at the user level. It supports three principal functions: registeruser, login, and gettoken. Here's the basic request and response flow:

Do you have an idea for a cool and powerful Android application that can make use of one or more AWS services (preferably using the AWS SDK for Android)?

If so, now is the time to design and code the application and submit it to the Amazon Appstore via the Appstore Developer Program. All valid Android apps submitted between now and November 15, 2011 are eligible to receive a $50 promotion code (AWS credit).

The AWS SDK for Android gives you access to the storage, database, and messaging services that you'll need to build some very interesting apps.

AWS Evangelist Matt Wood has recorded a really nice video with more information about developing applications for Android:

Over the summer months, we'd like to share a few stories from startups around the world: what are they working on and how they are using the cloud to get things done. Today, we're profiling Appscend, from Bucharest, Romania!

Appscend is a sign that catching the "startup bug" and being able to run a high-tech company is possible waay outside Silicon Valley, in Romania, where startups don't have the benefit of tapping into a support system and extensive mentorship. I spoke to Gabi Dobocan, Appscend Cofounder, who was quick to tell me that his small team enjoys the challenge and is eager to work at least 10 times as hard as their counterparts in other countries in order to compete. To date, they have received support from local angel investor and mentor, Peter Barta, and from an extended entrepreneur network from Western Europe. We wish Gabi and his team the best of luck :)

About Appscend

Appscend is "Wordpress for mobile" software. Since day one, the vision for Appscend was to create a robust, highly customizable product that can produce feature-rich mobile apps in record time. Today, a few months after launch, Appscend has enlisted over 400 registered users working on about 300 mobile apps. Among these customers, Appscend works with Domo, one of the largest local retailers, the Romanian National Television, and a couple of important local publishers. Appscend currently supports iOS apps and their development team is working on releasing an Android version in the next few months.

"100% AWSomeness"

Appscend offers a series of products geared at enabling our customers to build rich mobile apps apps using an intuitive, customizable interface. Our target audience is made up of digital publishers and agencies, so our products need to be easy to use and offer a wide array of functionality: we offer a mobile CMS, accessible for anyone that doesn't have a way to host their content elsewhere and have made it easy for users to import and export content. We help customers who build their mobile apps through Appscend track social activity around their content and we also offer them the ability to implement in-app purchases. In addition, to help our customers further monetize their mobile apps, we have enabled them to display ads inside their apps through an ad management server.

To build all these products, we use most of the cloud web services provided by Amazon Web Services and are delighted to call our implementation 100% AWSomeness.

Amazon S3 buckets are used for storing all the multimedia content used in the apps, optimized for mobile consumption.

The S3 buckets are connected to a Amazon CloudFront distribution to insure minimum latency wherever our clients' end-users are located.

Our customer dashboard, as well as all background processes, are hosted on Amazon EC2 instances.

Our ad server is based on Google Adwhirl and is hosted on an Amazon EC2 instance.

The software connects to Amazon SimpleDB domains that hold information regarding to the apps and statistics.

Everything is powered by a MySQL 5 Enterprise server hosted on an Amazon RDS instance. We find it a good solution because we can scale very easily and the performance provided is excellent.

Finally, we keep in touch with our clients by sending email messages through Amazon SES, and we've also configured email alerts for our operators using the same service. In the future, we will look at implementing AWS CloudFormation in order to be able to provision resources as quickly as possible.

On Building a Startup in Romania and the Mobile Market

Right now, we're living our dream and working on our passion. It's really what makes us happy, what makes us grow, and at the end of the (12 hour working) day, that's all that matters. We survive, we take nothing for granted, and we do good with limited resources.

The mobile market is really still a young, fragmented market and we work hard to always be alert, listen and learn as much as we can. We're probably gonna change a lot of this product in the next year, and we welcome that :) Challenging your own beliefs and being flexible and open-minded is the only real way to evolve I think - as a company and as a person.